1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to systems and methods for summarizing text, and more particularly toward combining text summarizations.
2. Discussion of Background Art
The accessibility to and the need to understand information have significantly grown in the past several decades. Managing such huge quantities of information often then, becomes more of a burden than a resource. In response, the field of automated Text Summarization (TS) has developed. Text summarization defines a variety of techniques for reducing a set of source text into a relatively shorter set of summarized text.
Techniques used within the summarization field include Text Extraction (TE) and Text Abstraction (TA). Text extraction generally involves selecting a subset of “important” sentences, such as headlines leading sentences in a paragraph, proper nouns or phrases, citations, boldface or italic type, and etc. within a source text, which are then combined into what becomes a summarized text. Text Abstraction has a similar goal, however techniques for “interpreting/conceptualizing” the text are used.
Text summarization techniques are applicable to white papers, periodicals, legal documents, Internet searches, as well as many other information processing domains.
Due to the importance of text summarization, many companies have introduced summarization products that work to varying degrees. In fact, some summarizers tend to work better on some types of source text, but not others. Improvements in the field tend to be incremental and isolated, resulting in a patchwork of summarization strengths.
Some attempts have been made to combine multiple summarization techniques into a single product; however, these combinations tend to require generation of a completely new set of code that integrates the different techniques in a very detailed and involved way. Such code would need to be supplemented and perhaps even completely rewritten each time a new summarization technique was created.
Currently, however, there are no text summarization products that are able to quickly leverage the unique strengths currently found in existing text summarization systems, as well those yet to be developed.
In response to the concerns discussed above, what is needed is a system and method for text summarization that overcomes the problems of the prior art.